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Saturday night I attended “TICKTOCK” a work-in-progress showing of Syren Modern Dance and The Ohio State University’s Center for Cosmology and AstroParticle Physics (CCAPP) Visiting Fellow, Dr. Paul Sutter. The collaboration was sponsored by The STEAM Factory which is an Ohio State space fostering research relationships in a STEAM (Science, Technology, Education, Art and Math) custom. I was super excited to see the space and get to know what actually happens there. This is the first time there was an event of this kind open to the public (so I still don’t know what actually happens there) and it was engaging and the audience’s reaction was palpable.

The performance was inside a demonstration illustrating how Syren generally works choreographically, how the company sought out Dr. Sutter for his expertise in physics and how their collaboration unfolded. That’s a lot of hows…

Sutter is an avid speaker and has the radio show, Space Radio.* WCBE 90.5 hosted the event as a fundraiser. The first segment of the work they showed featured his speaking and walking around the performance area Morgan Freeman style in the “Through the Wormhole series” as the dancers narrated his words, “The faster you move in space, the slower you move in time.” Sutter varied this sentence repeatedly and the dancers organized in different ways demonstrating/acting out through movement what he was saying. He also told stories and the dancers gathered around his storytelling self before blasting off as characters traveling through space, illustrating different continuums, alluding to time-travel and multidimensional worlds. At one point the dancers even lift him up in a half-sitting position and float him across the space. All to illustrate different moments of time. If you haven’t surmised, the piece Syren and Dr. Sutter are creating together is about time.

They showed multiple sections. One section was created from physics action words that Kate St. Amand, co-director of Syren and choreographer for TICKTOCK, asked Sutter to come up with, such as rotation (which as discussed is about traveling less through time and more through space). Let’s just remember my affinity toward aboutness for a second. And we’re back.

The audience was given multiple opportunities to ask questions. At one point the dancers improvised the answers that Sutter was giving about questions such as, “Is there such a thing as a parallel universe? and “Is the discovery of time travel considered inevitable?” The dancers mirrored each other through space as Sutter described perpendicular multiple dimensions as a possibility more than parallel universes. This reminded me of Marvel’s The Flash. Sutter responded to the latter question explaining that time travel at this moment is considered impossible, but no one actually knows why. The ten year old next to me even asked a few completely succinct and thoughtful questions throughout the evening about the speed of light. The audience was energized and felt engaged and heard, you could feel it.

*He also hosted a segment this week with the Syren Modern Dance’s co-directors Kate St. Amand and Lynn Peterson.

Synchronous Objects examines William Forsythe’s “One Flat Thing” in ways I’ve never seen quantified. It’s an interface designed to visually represent connections through movements, improvisations and choreography. It’s as if the “making of” part of a movie was integrated with the performance in three different camera views. It allows the viewer to both decide what they want to hear and/or see and at the same time focus there attention on specific carves, arcs, weight, etc. through space.

You can also click through the creation process of the interface on the website, further deepening your understanding of the creation process. At the beginning of this web-experience the question, “What else might physical thinking look like?” pops up.

Wayne McGregor did a Ted Talk, “A Choreographer’s creative process in real time.” I was immersed in the familiar way the dancers were asked to perform newly synthesized movements and relationships. I immediately recognized the familiar assignments and the state of the dancers as they instantly synthesized physical thought. As the dancers moved from jittery (first learning and applying) to a little more integrated in the body only 5-minutes later, I thought, look at all the ways we can think with our bodies and how they move. Amazing.

I think this might be a running post as I continue to add examples of physical thought…

Light and shadow is resonating with me. What you see and what you don’t see. There are parts hidden, always; Andre Zachary mentioned this Monday. During our portrait study we shared details about people in the class that were chosen or curated creating a lens the audience would see through. Each person’s world is curated by themselves. Facebook and Instagram profiles are curated to project a certain persona. The news is curated. I curate my children’s world as much as I can. I curate my work, my blog, my fashion (if you can call it that), my food. Choices are the curation of life. Ideas of protection, mediation, filtering and triangulation come up for me when thinking about a curated life, either the life you curate for yourself or the life someone else’s perspective has curated of your life.

My intermedia lab group ended up creating our Portrait Project with me at the center. There were ideas of interviews, auditions, interrogations and being put in situations where I was told my truths were being questioned. The social experiment of it was interesting to me. My team mates were to ask questions of me that I didn’t know before hand so I would have to really think about the answer and upon answering the question they would say, “Interesting,” in a way akin to an interrogation. The fascinating part was even though I knew they meant no ill will and we had set the project up like this I questioned my answers. Which is absurd because there was no reason the truth of the answers could be questioned.

The conceptual and social commentary in our Viewings spark some particular feelings right now. Jerome Bel’s “Veronique,” Antonia Baehr’s “LAUGH”, Amara Tabor Smith’s “House/Full” and Michelle Ellsworth’s “The Rehearsal Artist,” along with Andre Zachary’s examples of process in Monday’s class and our subsequent discussions of mapping/notation with him in Laban today. These all create a web of discourse linking the viewer to the artist in different ways. I’m interested in the word “affect” right now as well and I think there is something of that in here. Zachary links his dancers through his new dissection of language through process. Ellsworth, Bel and Baehr are linking the audience, performer and artist by prompting the viewer to question what is happening and why it’s happening. Smith is linking her work with different areas of Oakland giving it a sense of place and mapping automatically linking it to people watching but also the communities in those places.

Process can be concept. Process is full of context. Process can be performance. The behind the scenes is often more interesting to me than the performance, but in these works they have weaved process into the performance. The process is happening as it unfolds, the audience is processing and will continue to process after. The artists are saying something. Speaking out is resonating with me right now and these choreographers did that in a way that speaks on many levels, in many different contexts and cross culturally. What are you going to say and what makes this the moment you are going to say it? These choreographers are speaking out, sometimes more subtly than others, but even if you don’t get it immediately, you can feel it.

I went into the studio on Monday with a stack of newspapers, a highlighter and my computer with a article of Susan Kozel discussing the possibility of doing a phenomenology on affect. I had an image in my head of drawing a simple house on pages of newspaper and crumbling them up and throwing them away. I couldn’t and still can’t figure out if or how that fits into my laban movement phrase but when I presented my further investigation to my MFA Choreography Workshop, they found a seriousness, a darkness and a political content within the new laban inspired phrase. I found this interesting because I envisioned drawing that picture of a house on the politics section of the paper. In the studio, I adhered to the rules stated in the previous post. I noticed I was seemingly most interested in leading/initiated movement with a particular body part and primary weight in a place that is not your feet.

In Choreography Workshop it is currently an open forum for anyone to give suggestions or choreographic thoughts in an attempt to remove the preciousness of something created and find other creative avenues. I performed the movement the first time among Dave Covey’s paintings on canvas scattered around the floor. Dave is the facilitator of Choreography Workshop and he has created paintings inspired by our workshop together among others. For the second showing of my phrase, Dave selected a soundtrack of the women who confronted Senator Flake in the elevator to play during my movement and another student suggested I confine the phrase to a specific part of the stage surrounded by his paintings.

I’m noticing the state of the country, our president, Kavanaugh/Ford, the “Me Too” movement, the fact that California has to make a law to require women on the boards of publicly traded companies, etc. etc. etc. is increasingly effecting me. Perhaps this movement does have something to do with the current political climate. Perhaps my affect has something to do with the effect?

Susan Kozel spoke in ACCAD’s Motion Lab at OSU last week and she packed her hour presentation with current works. “Performing Encryption” which involved converting and encrypting movement into data, then creating movement to encrypt and decrypt the encryption. She also spoke about her project “Living Archives” which works with archiving movement and performing memory. This project lead her to working with Margret Sara Gudjonsdottir who is a choreographer who works primarily in states. Gudjonsdottir and Kozel and another collaborator, Jeannette Ginslov, are working on a project called Conspiracy Archives, involving archiving Gudjonsdottir’s choreography of somatic resonance and states. When glancing, it seems almost as if they are doing nothing or only moving very slowly, but they have spent hours to arrive in these particular states. They are not necessarily an emotion, but they could involve them I believe. So, basically I’m not sure what exactly they are, but it is very interesting to me. Moving slowly in these states creates certain affects between audience and performer and even between the performer an their surroundings, “if you allow it,” Kozel says. Susan Kozel is a phenomenologist that is most recently interested in the phenomenology of affect.

These words of affect and phenomenology were thrown around a lot in this presentation and I feel like they are such ephemeral words for me right now. One minute I completely understand the words and why they are being used and the next minute I’ve lost it. How can you study something that is happening right now? How can you think about doing the thing if your too busy thinking about doing it? Perhaps you can only study the thing if you are on the outside? Max Van Manen writes, “Phenomenology is the philosophical name for the method of investigating or inquiring into the meanings of our experiences as we live them.” I’m still a little confused about what is actually being investigated. It also seems that if your investigating it in the moment, by the time you investigate the moment it has past and so you are not actually living in it but you are investigating the past experience. This is the part that confuses me. The aspect of time.

Manen also lead me to this great video, “16: Moments” directed by William Hoffman. I’ve seen it before but in this context I believe Manen is alluding that any of these moments could be investigated phenomenologically: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNVPalNZD_I

When looking into affect I found “Emerging Perspectives on Judgement and Decision Research” to have a great first sentence to Chapter 10, which basically says, no one knows. But it was written in 2008, so perhaps phenomenologists know a little more 10 years later.

“Although researchers in the field of emotion have not yet agreed on a precise definition of affect, we use a specific definition throughout this chapter. We see affect as “goodness” or “badness” (1) experienced as a feeling state (with or without consciousness) and (2) demarcating a positive or negative quality of a specific stimulus.”

“We distinguish affect from emotion, which generally refers to particular states (such as anger, fear, or happiness) that are “intense, short-lived, and usually have a definite cause and clear cognitive content” (Schneider, 328). We also distinguish affect from mood, which generally refers to a feeling (such as having the blues) that is low in intensity, can last for a few minutes or several weeks, has no object or has fleeting objects, and does not have to have a specific antecedent cause or cognitive content.”

“Unlike emotion, we view affect as having the capacity to be subtle and to be without elaborate appraisal properties; unlike mood, we view affect as having a direct (rather than indirect) motivational effect. Similar to mood and emotion, however, affect can vary along both valence (positive, negative) and arousal (high, low) dimensions. ” (Schneider, 328)

For their purposes, Schneider and Shanteau are most interested in the “potentially subtle feelings triggered by the object of judgement or choice and not on the influence of specific emotions or background mood state on the judgement or choice. (Schneider, 328)

Again, I still feel like affect is either so specific a thing it is hard to define or is so simple an idea I’m making it out to be something bigger than it is. But if the latter is true, I can’t see people writing chapters about it.

That is where I am right now. As Christina Providence, my current pilates/gestalt guru would say, “Be where you are.”

The phrase I created was task based and ended up being really interesting. I might have done these movements without these tasks, but what was most interesting was the intention and focus required to make sure the movement was most about sliding without weight or initiating with the elbow.

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A short aboutness

Tara Burns is a performer, maker and educator currently pursuing an MFA in dance at The Ohio State University. Her current research involves investigating the intimacy of audience/performer gaze and the power dynamics of objects and people in space.